Sex Offenders and the Military
A few years ago we lived in on post housing at another duty station. Our children were very young. I decided to look up registered sex offenders within 40 miles of our location. Shockingly I found out that we had a registered sex offender living (on post) a few blocks over from us. The person was a teenager. I had no idea (and no way to find out) what offense he had committed, was it really against children, was it a situation with a younger girlfriend? I had no idea. But what I did know was that he was living within a few blocks of my home and my children and I did not find that acceptable.I contacted IG and other people on installation for answers. I was told that it was a post by post decision and that this individual had been given permission to live in on post housing.
My question is: Is that acceptable?
As a mother, I would reply to that question a very firm - NO!
I do have confidence in installation commanders and their abilities to make informed decisions relating to the safety of families on post. I don't think that any of them would put my family in jeopardy. At the same time, I am a mother and the mother in me wants to protect my children. I would never make the decision to rent or purchase a home off post that was near a sex offender residence. I would also never accept military housing if I knew there was a sex offender living near by. It is a personal choice.
I want to know that if I am living on a military installation that there are no sex offenders living, working or visiting my installation. Is that too much to ask? I don't think so.
That then brings up the need to sex offender registry check, not only military families requesting on post housing, but also the civilians that are now living in housing on some installations. What about the contractors working on installations, are all of them checked? They are roaming my neighborhood on a daily basis - can I feel assured that they are not offenders?
This is a HUGE issue. What are your thoughts and/or experiences?
Problems Keeping Sex Offenders off Base
Nearly a year after the Department of the Navy issued a tough policy barring sex offenders from Navy and Marine Corps bases, the service is struggling to enforce it.
Sex offenders must be identified and banned from all bases unless they receive a waiver, according to an Oct. 7, 2008, memo from then-Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter and a May 27 memo detailing the order.
But identifying sex offenders could require installations worldwide to check their many thousands of servicemembers, civilians and dependents against flawed and sometimes inaccurate sex offender registries.
“We don’t want sex offenders in the Navy and we’re going to do whatever is required to make sure we’re effective,” current Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said Aug. 27 near Yokosuka Naval Base. “In terms of background checks and things like that, I don’t know. It’s an ongoing thing that we’re looking at.”
Winter’s order originally called for the policy to be implemented by last December. For now, anyone applying for on-base housing must sign a form stating whether they or their command-sponsored family members have committed a sex offense.
“The other aspects still remain under review because it’s partly in the discovery phase of how to execute this,” said Capt. William Fenick, spokesman for the Navy’s installations command headquarters in Washington.
No date has been set for when that phase will be complete, Fenick said.
The Army and Air Force don’t have polices that call for sex offenders to be identified and banned. However, base commanders have broad authority to restrict access and housing to any individual.
How to find a sex offender
States run their own registries, but there is no federal registry for sex offenders on an overseas military base.
If a Navy or Marine base wanted to check for a sex crime conviction in a civilian court, it could turn to individual state registries, or to a federal database compiled from the state registries.
Either option has its flaws.
A sex offender living on a base overseas — and in some cases, within the United States — might no longer be listed publicly as a sex offender.
When a sex offender leaves a state, “some [states] keep the offenders on an inactive status, but still posted on their Web sites, while others remove them entirely from both,” said Lori McPherson, a policy adviser with the Department of Justice’s Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking Office, or SMART.
While there is a National Sex Offender Public Web site www.nsopw.gov, it is a collection of state data and not a registry.
Both that site and the FBI’s National Sex Offender Registry rely on reporting by state and local agencies, many of which differ on what information to report and when to do it.
A December 2008 report from the Department of Justice Inspector General found that both the public and FBI databases “are inaccurate and incomplete.”
The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act required the SMART office, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to develop a system that would track registered sex offenders when they leave or return to the United States.
That system also is a work in progress, said McPherson, though it should improve tracking of military-affiliated sex offenders overseas.
posted by LoveMyTanker @ 1:07 PM
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